This is a journal entry at least partially about smooth jazz. You have been warned.

Smooth jazz came back to me this week; as I've been spending the majority of my off-work time gearing up for a big move to Oakland (also known as Oak-town, the 5-1-0 and, my personal favorite, Bump City). As I've been preparing for the transition, I've tried to consolidate large portions of my life into progressively smaller bits: selling old DVDs that will never again see the inside of a DVD player, donating books to the local library and, most recently, copying my CD collection to digital form on my home computer. The thinking being that once everything's digitized and backed up on my external hard drive, I can unload the majority of discs and get mucho store credit at Amoeba Records.

Picking through the stacks of CDs, it's amazing to take a look at music I haven't listened to in a decade or more. I could go through the pain of listing some of the more embarrassing musical purchasing decisions I've made in my life--including an appalling smooth jazz streak running through the middle part of the collection that gives me teeny little tumors just thinking about it--but that wouldn't be very productive. Besides, in my defense, this was the kind of thing that my friends and I (most of us budding musicians and jazz snobs) were into at the time.

Now, ten years later, when I consider the collection as a whole, it's interesting for me to see how my tastes have progressed since the days when I was a near-obsessive purchaser of CDs. Of course "progressed" may be an inaccurate term because, if anything, my musical tastes have greatly simplified in the last ten years. I have almost completely lost my ear for the kind of challenging musicianship that thrilled me not too long ago. Flipping through radio stations in my car, if I happen to land on our local jazz station, I find myself often cringing at the soul-free production values and by-the-numbers formula of what I hear.

When considered against my musical tastes, my gaming preferences have remained largely steady for the majority of my life. For me, it's always been about sports games, with a light smattering of role playing games thrown in for good measure. Sure I'll dabble in other genres, particularly when big-name titles come around but I always seem to come back to the things I like, the games that I've most identified with during my time with the hobby.

In contrast, as I've been digitally backing up my musical collection, I've come across many CDs for which I have not a single recollection or emotional tie to. I'm quite sure there's a number of discs in my collection that never saw a single play-through, much less two or three. I even created a playlist on iTunes last weekend entitled "Songs I've Never Heard" and was surprised at how quickly that playlist filled up of music utterly foreign to me, despite having owned the CDs on which they came. That can't be said for my game collection; though it may suffer from sports-related tunnel vision, I have an emotional bond, a story or fond remembrance, for nearly every entry in the collection.

And still there's another layer to this hierarchy of personal pop culture priorities. Though I generally find greater pleasure in my games collection than my music collection, there are select CDs that I own that I would never want to be without and that I consider of great personal importance. I'm not sure I can say the same thing about any single game I own. I have a great affinity for many of them, yet there are few, if any, that I could absolutely not do without. Yet I have music (and, yes, books too) in my collection that, much like Charlton Heston and his rifle, you'll only pry out of my cold dead hands.

They're fickle things, these preferences and priorities, ones that are certainly difficult to define. Some are a product of time--what you think of as entertaining now you may look on as inane ten years from now--and some are utterly immune to it. And though I doubt I'll ever consider any title in my game collection to be the gaming equivalent of smooth jazz, at the same time I'm still waiting for that one title that will grab me and never let me go; the game that you'll only pry out of my cold dead hands.